7/01/2010 @ 12:20PM

Google Is No Peeper

Companies should be held responsible for their mistakes. consider, if nothing else, BP. But should a company be led off to the stockade for an errant line of code? Google seems to be in that position, courtesy of the emerging global privacy industry.

Most users of
Google
Maps know of its Street View feature, which lets you see block-by-block shots of the world’s busiest streets. As a technology exercise Street View is both remarkable and a little creepy. It means you can stroll down your favorite Paris boulevard, window-shopping along the way. It also means that random strangers anywhere in the world may be able to see a picture of the outside of your house.

It’s not a live shot, of course. The pictures are taken by roving Google cars decked out with obtrusive rooftop cameras that periodically drive around the planet’s urban areas, recording digital photos as they go.

Like
McDonald’s
and
Starbucks
, Google turns out to be as popular in Europe as it is in the U.S. With citizens, that is. By contrast, many European privacy regulators are disquieted by the idea of so much information being in a single set of hands–a position that, considering the political events on the Continent during the middle of the last century, isn’t entirely unreasonable. In the course of answering questions from German regulators, Google discovered that, in addition to its Street View pictures, its cars were also collecting snippets of publicly accessible Wi-Fi Internet traffic as they drove around–whatever someone happened to be uploading or downloading when the Google vehicle was in his Wi-Fi hot spot.

The company said this was a mistake. The program collecting the data was, in effect, a free one that’s widely used to diagnose network traffic. Google said it didn’t even realize it was running. All the information was deleted as soon as it was discovered. Why should we believe Google’s explanation? Because it’s the only one that makes any sense. The network traffic being recorded was in largely random bits and pieces. Even an evil-genius hacker would have a hard time finding something to do with it.

Nonetheless, Google found itself being hauled in front of ministers throughout Europe. When the news reached the U.S., state attorneys general started doing the same thing. A number of them were in the middle of political campaigns. Could there be a relation between the two?

The inevitable other shoe dropped when plaintiff lawyers began contemplating class actions against Google for the grievous and callous emotional harm it surely inflicted on someone somewhere.

Google is a big company, and there isn’t any harm in keeping it on its toes by paying attention to what critics of the company have to say. Now and then, though, it would be nice if all the sound and fury would signify something. This time they don’t.